The Denver Gazette highlights a Common Sense Institute analysis of Colorado’s exploding use of TABOR-exempt fees. TABOR requires voter approval for new taxes. Colorado’s political class apparently read that and heard, “Please invent a synonym.”
The result is a sprawling enterprise-fee system touching healthcare, energy, transportation, higher education, insurance, and more. In fiscal year 2025, Colorado’s state enterprises collected $28.2 billion in TABOR-exempt revenue. That was up from $25.8 billion the year before, a 9.6% jump in a single year. Since TABOR passed, enterprise revenue has grown nearly 3,700%, while population growth and inflation combined rose 185%. That is not a rounding error. That is a second tax system wearing a fake mustache.
The article is careful to note that not every dollar is a direct household bill. Some revenue comes from tuition, businesses, and users of particular services. Fine. But families still eat those costs through registrations, utilities, insurance premiums, housing, tuition, permits, and prices passed along by employers. Government may call the charge an enterprise fee. Your checking account remains stubbornly uninterested in the branding.
The Bullet Point Brief
- TABOR says lawmakers must ask voters before raising taxes. The workaround is to call the charge a fee, assign it to an enterprise, and continue mugging the wallet with better stationery.
- Colorado enterprises collected $28.2 billion in TABOR-exempt revenue in 2025, more than half the size of the entire state budget. Apparently “outside TABOR” now means “large enough to have its own weather system.”
- Enterprise revenue reached $4,692 per Coloradan in 2025, though that is an average across households, businesses, tuition, and service users. Nobody gets one tidy bill. Government prefers the artisanal approach, slipping charges into everything you touch.
- Since 2018, voters approved income-tax cuts totaling 0.38 percentage points. Over the same period, growth in non-higher-education enterprise revenue equaled a 1.8-point income-tax increase. Voters lowered the tax they could see while lawmakers quietly inflated the one hiding behind the curtain.
- Proposition 117 was supposed to require voter approval for large new enterprises. Since it took effect, the legislature created 10 enterprises without sending any to voters, generating $98 million in TABOR-exempt revenue. Consent remains very important, right up until it becomes inconvenient.
My Bottom Line
Colorado did not become unaffordable by accident. It happened one modest fee, responsible assessment, temporary surcharge, and absolutely-not-a-tax at a time. Every individual charge gets presented as small, necessary, compassionate, green, modern, or too technical for regular people to question. Then the car registration arrives, the utility bill climbs, insurance jumps, housing gets worse, and some legislator announces that government never raised your taxes.
That is taxation cosplay. If government mandates the payment, collects the money, spends the proceeds, and punishes you for refusing, normal people are allowed to call bullshit when officials insist the economic burden is somehow different because a lawyer found a friendlier noun.
Not every fee is illegitimate. A charge directly tied to a specific service can make sense. But that honest category has become camouflage for a much larger political habit. The Denver and Boulder governing class treats TABOR like a speed bump instead of a constitutional warning label. Voters said, “Ask us.” The ruling class replied, “We found a workaround.”
Affordability will not improve until Colorado stops pretending language can repeal arithmetic. Families do not care whether the extra cost is printed under “tax,” “fee,” “assessment,” or “sustainability contribution.” They care that the bill got heavier again. The people running this state should try respecting that reality before they create another enterprise dedicated to studying why nobody can afford to live here.
Source: The Denver Gazette
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